After 20+ years of technical, economics, and business analysis, I will offer up my best piece of advice to young data analysis folks looking to make an name for themselves: Focus on the mix. Or more particularly, changes in the mix.

The mix of what? It could be most anything. Here is a recent example from economics, arguing that the slowdown in wages is in part due to a mix shift in the country's employment to lower-paying industries. In the corporate world, it could be the mix of markets, or customers, or regions. Typical metrics used in the business world almost always miss mix. In a large aerospace company, we had the irritating situation that the profitability of every single product line was rising at the same time revenues were rising but overall profitability was falling. The problem was the mix. The most profitable product lines were all on older aircraft, ironically because they were the least reliable (aerospace parts companies have traditionally operated on a razor and blades model, so that more failures let one sell more really profitable aftermarket parts). As airlines modernized, our mix shifted to new product lines which were less profitable. This difference in profitability was also due to a mix shift -- since newer products were way more reliable, more newer aircraft in the fleets shifted the mix from aftermarket sales (which were astoundingly profitable) to OEM sales (which were often made at a loss).

I have now tried out Windows Vista with its first service pack and I am still not clear what Vista adds over XP, except upgrade costs, an interface system that requires retraining employees and a lot of extra computer overhead, and compatibility problems. XP is stable and great for us.

As you may know, most XP OEM sales come to an end on June 30. Dell has already announced they will still sell XP units under the downgrade options in the Vista license. Good for them. In fact, it looks like Dell expects that customers will be willing to pay additional money ($20-$50) for the older operating system. LOL.

Anyway, this month I bought an additional 5 Windows XP OEM licenses from NewEgg.com to put on the shelf to cover future computer builds out past June 30 (I build many of the computers for myself and the company).

By the way, if you want a gauge on how Vista is doing, check out the right bar pn this page at Amazon.com. On the top 10 bestsellers (on June 18, 2008), XP occupies slots 2,4,6,7,9 while Vista is in slots 3,8 & 10. Note that is over 18 months after Vista was introduced to replace XP.

I won't go into my bad experiences with Vista, nor into the story of my purge of Vista from all personal and corporate computers, but you can read here and here.

Here are some interesting Amazon sales rank numbers as of 10/16/07 for Vista vs. XP, which Vista supposedly replaced 12 months ago. All the following are sales ranks in the Amazon software category, with a lower number implying higher sales:

XP Home Full Edition: #19XP Home Upgrade: #105Vista Home Basic Full Edition: #277Vista Home Basic Upgrade: #174

Obviously this is unscientific, because it is just one channel. Also, Vista has more different segmented SKU's, so the product comparison is not exactly apples to apples. But it is interesting, no?

The OEM market is going to skew towards Vista because that is what OEM's tend to load by default. But even so, Dell, for example, is still offering Windows XP as an OEM option, a pretty unprecedented move this long after a new Windows launch. But the Amazon traffic is probably 99% OS changes, since almost everyone with a PC gets an OEM version loaded. Most of the Vista purchases are going to be upgrades from XP, and most of the XP purchases are going to be downgrades from Vista. Does this mean Vista downgrading is outstripping Vista Upgrading?

Postscript: It has now been two months since I downgraded to XP on my kid's laptop, and we are still amazed at how much better everything runs now. I was afraid I could not get all the drivers for XP but in the end I was succesful and everything, including the sound, is working great. There are a LOT of websites nowadays to help you downgrade. Or you can try dual booting.

Update: The real indicator that this is Vista downgrade sales of XP is that the Full Edition is out-selling the upgrade edition, which is a reverse of history when XP was the lead product. When I downgraded, I found I could not use the upgrade version of XP and had to use the full edition. My guess is that others have the same problem, and that the very high sales rank of the XP full edition is very likely due to high downgrade demand.

I wrote previously that I think Vista, in its current state, is inferior to Windows XP (particularly for businesses -- Directx 10 will make Vista a must for gamers). For my desktop computers, I build them myself and can still get Windows XP OEM through NewEgg. Unfortunately, for my kids new laptop, I had no choice but Vista. I have not been very happy. Here are my results so far.

It is way slower than XP, even on a fast dual-core Intel machine with a Nvidia 7900 graphics card. You may have thought that the reboot and shut down process could not have gotten slower - WRONG! Shutdown alone takes forever.

Many machines being sold today with Vista are not fast enough to really run it. In particular, if your laptop is more than a year old or you paid less than $1700 or so for it, it is probably not going to do the job

Um, its pretty

Firefox will not run reliably. It will install, and run once, and then it will give an error if you try to run it again. It does not uninstall fully, and once (I tried to install and remove several times) it did not even show up in the uninstall menu

Unlike with XP, networking did not work right off the bat with Vista. I had to do a lot of fiddling in menus that the average user wil never find or understand to get it running.

Of course, as is usual, Microsoft has felt the need to yet again totally reorganize control panel and the right-click-on-the-desktop menu. I am sure some day the new organization will seem natural, but for now its just a gratuitous change with no apparent benefit

If at all possible, I advise you to wait for Service Pack 1, and for Moore's Law to let average computers catch up with Vista's requirements. And don't even think about upgrading if you have old printers, scanners, and/or oddball devices you need to hook up -- there are very few Vista drivers out there for legacy equipmet

Short version: avoid Vista. Longer version: I wrote previously about Vista writing a new chapter in fair use:

Because, having killed fair use for multiple copies, believe it or
not, the media companies are attempting to kill fair use even for the
original media by the original buyer! I know this sounds crazy, but in
Windows Vista, media companies are given the opportunity to, in
software, study your system, and if they feel that your system is not
secure enough, they can downgrade the quality of the media you
purchased or simply refuse to have it play. In other words, you may
buy an HD DVD and find that the media refuses to play on your system,
not because you tried to copy it, but because it feels like your system
*might* be too open. The burden of proof is effect on the user to prove to the media companies that their system is piracy-proof before the media they paid for will play...

Back to the book
analogy, it's as if the book will not open and let itself be read unless
you can prove to the publisher that you are keeping the book in a
locked room so no one else will ever read it. And it is Microsoft who
has enabled this, by providing the the tools to do so in their
operating system. Remember the fallout from Sony putting spyware, err copy protection, in their CD's -- turns out that that event was just a dress rehearsal for Windows Vista.

Windows Vista includes an array of "features" that you don't want.
These features will make your computer less reliable and less secure.
They'll make your computer less stable and run slower. They will cause
technical support problems. They may even require you to upgrade some
of your peripheral hardware and existing software. And these features
won't do anything useful. In fact, they're working against you. They're
digital rights management (DRM) features built into Vista at the behest
of the entertainment industry.

has reworked a lot of the core operating system to add copy protection
technology for new media formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray disks. Certain
high-quality output paths--audio and video--are reserved for protected
peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded;
sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends
CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you're doing
something that it thinks you shouldn't. If it does, it limits
functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem.
We still don't know the exact details of all this, and how far-reaching
it is, but it doesn't lookgood....

Unfortunately, we users are caught in the crossfire. We are not only
stuck with DRM systems that interfere with our legitimate fair-use
rights for the content we buy, we're stuck with DRM systems that
interfere with all of our computer use--even the uses that have nothing
to do with copyright....

In the meantime, the only advice I can offer you is to not upgrade
to Vista.

We have about 50 computers in the company and I have banned everyone from upgrading to Vista. I have studied Vista and there is nothing there that helps my business, and a lot that hurts it (e.g. higher initial price and much higher system requirements.) If we upgraded, we might have to replace half our old ink jet printers just because the manufacturers are really unlikely to write Vista drivers for them. We have 4 Dell's in the closet with XP loaded. After those are used up, I will build all the future computers myself. I have several OEM copies of XP on the shelf (less than 1/2 price of the Vista retail upgrade) and I will buy more if it looks like they are going to stop selling it. I would switch everyone to Linux, except most of my employees are not very computer savvy and its just too hard to get them all trained. I will probably only buy Vista for one box, which is my gaming machine at home, and even that is at least a year away before anyone has a killer DirectX 10 game I have to have.